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Caustic Comedian Alters Italy’s Political Map

Beppe Grillo is firing up voters exhausted by a bankrupt status quo.Credit
Calogero Russo for the International Herald Tribune

GARBAGNATE MILANESE, Italy — A rapt crowd gathered in this drab town in the Milanese hinterland one evening this month to hear Beppe Grillo, an Italian comedian, serve up his characteristically caustic take on the country’s politics. And he did not disappoint.

Mr. Grillo pointed to the row of fresh-faced Italians — candidates of his Five Star Movement — on the stage behind him. “These kids, they may be inexperienced — they still haven’t learned how to rig a budget, or give contracts to their friends,” he paused, his gravely voice drowned out by laughter and applause.

What they are, he said, is the product of the “hyper-democracy” that he has been promoting through his blog and the plethora of Web sites that have aggregated like-minded Italians bent on proselytizing for a new form of political activism.

It is through a deft mixture of mordant humor, righteous anger and grass-roots organization that Mr. Grillo’s movement is proving to others that it is no joke.

Committed to changing Italy’s entrenched political system by offering an Internet-driven, consensus-based alternative, the three-year-old Five Star Movement has quickly become a force to contend with in Italy’s fractious and fractured political arena.

In a first round of local elections earlier this month, candidates from the movement ran in 101 of 941 cities and captured nearly 200,000 votes — a national average of 9 percent — enough to become the second or third political force in some municipalities. In runoff elections this week the movement won mayoralties in one major city — Parma — and three smaller towns. The average age of the four mayors elected with the movement was 31 years, about half the average age of Parliament members.

“We’re at the beginning of something new that will change everything; the Web is sweeping everything away, toward a world most people don’t even know exists,” said Mr. Grillo, a popular comic for more than four decades, who has more than 550,000 followers on Twitter and nearly 850,000 “likes” on Facebook. “It’s difficult to understand.”

In person, Mr. Grillo, 63, is far more subdued than he is on stage, where he is a whirlwind of jokes and gibes aimed at Italy’s “moribund political parties” and its leaders, including Prime Minister Mario Monti. Mr. Grillo, who is from Genoa, cheerfully refers to the prime minister as “rigor Montis” because of the government’s tough measures to decrease Italy’s debt.

Recent polls show that confidence in the traditional parties has plummeted below 5 percent, and Mr. Grillo’s antipolitics message has found fertile ground.

Angelo Pellegrino, a plumber who had come to hear Mr. Grillo, said: “Politicians are thieves, clowns, buffoons, they live like kings. Although, we are also to blame; we did, after all, vote for them.”

Political commentators have been tempted to dismiss Mr. Grillo’s movement as a national protest vote against entrenched interests, not unlike other dissident movements in Europe, like Germany’s progressive Pirate Party and the far-right Golden Dawn in Greece.

But the movement’s members reject the characterization, and promote their own agenda — an environmentally friendly, anticonsumerist, pro-education platform, articulated with plenty of local variations. Community chapters decide which issues they want to emphasize and then elect a “spokesperson” to represent the ideas in elections.

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“The novelty is the use of the Web as a constituency, the idea of new democracy, with a direct relationship between the elected and the electors,” said Federico Fornaro, a historian who has written about the movement. It is “a model of party in franchising,” he said.

The focus on local issues largely accounts for its success so far.

Speaking to his supporters on Monday night, Federico Pizzarotti, the newly elected mayor of Parma, pledged that he would be the people’s representative. “I think we can give an example to Italy, and to Europe, of what can be done if we work together,” he told a cheering crowd.

Before the elections, Mr. Grillo had described the vote in Parma as “our Stalingrad,” a reference to the World War II battle between Soviet and German forces that was a turning point in the war. On Monday night, he spoke of “taking Berlin,” a reference to the national elections that will be held next year, and are certain to pose new challenges to the movement’s ability to organize and mobilize its leaderless membership.

Finding a common message to deliver to the electorate will also test the glue of a “hyper-democratic” movement that refuses to define itself through labels and works out its political positions on Web sites.

“So far, they’ve only won in small cities,” said Paolo Natale, a professor of political sociology at the University of Milan. “It will be interesting to see whether the utopian vision they now propose can be incarnated for the national elections.”

That reliance on the movement’s followers on the Web as a point of contact is “both their strength, and their strong weakness,” he said. “They can be a bit naïve.”

Mr. Fornaro, the historian, described the movement’s shift to the national level as a “triple backward somersault with no net below,” he said.

He added, “It’s one thing to raise a ruckus, another to govern.”

None of that bothers Mr. Grillo, who is happy to acknowledge that the movement is a work in progress and insists that he is not first among equals or the movement’s “guru,” as his critics say.

Yet it is undeniable that the comic’s pronouncements — he is open, for example, to Italy’s exit from the euro zone — create shock waves. He also advocates forcing politicians to stand trial before a jury of average citizens. “There is no forgiveness in a popular movement,” he said.

The Internet is also unforgiving and has an inherent system of checks and balances, according to Gianroberto Casaleggio, the consultant responsible for developing Mr. Grillo’s online presence. “If you’re credible and popular like Grillo, then your message has wide diffusion on the Web,” he said. “It’s a Calvinist movement. If you lose your credibility, then your message has no future.”

Mr. Grillo gloated after Monday’s success that people were attuned to his message. “And now let’s take this wretched country,” he wrote on Twitter after the elections.

A version of this article appears in print on May 24, 2012, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Caustic Comedian in Italy Fosters a Movement Against Traditional Politics. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe